Under Construction: SimCity In-Game Footage Shown

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Maxis’ Lucy Bradshaw (senior VP and GM) invites you into her living room to watch some Sim City on her enormous telly. Originally broadcast live at some point during last night, it’s an hour and seventeen minutes of all things Sims and SimCity. It’s below, and I’ve highlighted the parts you’ll want to watch.

It’s all rather awkward, really. Presented on a big theatre stage, but with no audience, it creates the atmosphere of a dress rehearsal that really isn’t going so well. And like a parent not letting a kid have their dessert until they’ve eaten their vegetables, we’re made to sit through the latest aesthetic tweaks that have been made to the aging Sims 3 – weather! – before we’re allowed to see the game that isn’t actually out yet. So desperate are they to make sure you didn’t walk off until they were done that they filled the broadcast with secret magic words that you were supposed to gather to win prizes. Well, that’s all yesterday, and we can skip ahead. Or you can watch two men being absolutely enamoured by the idea of cleaning up a pile of leaves in a pretend garden.

Skipping forward is quite the experience. Jump to a pie-eating contest… Jump to an alien sim telepathically draining the motives of NPCs… A magical weather stone… And don’t forget the Curtis Paradis Show! An over-rehearsed chat-show format, where the presenter has no mic, and the three ‘guests’ share one mic. I want to take them all aside and give them a cuddle. None of them asked to be TV presenters – they’re game developers and producers.

But, leap ahead to 37 minutes and you can finally find some content on SimCity. And at last it’s some detailed, in-game footage, showing running cities as well as the very basics of road and zone building. The core bit you’ll want to watch runs from then until 46 minutes.

Also, jump to 1.05 to see the first revealed disaster. Or, er, watch the entire thing for another one.

I’m encouraged to see how much it looks like it plays like Sim City 2000. Fears of things being over-simplified, or streamlined to the point of casual play, look like they can be put aside. Worrying about sewage is proof enough. I often feel like I’ve no desire to ever return to management games, and then watching this I find that itch returning.

Other key info in there is that cities will be 2km by 2km, and there definitely won’t be terraforming. This is justified by the landscapes being “puzzles”, where figuring out how to build on a terrain is part of the challenge. There will be rivers, lakes, etc, along with boat transpot. But no subways! And they confirm that the multiplayer nature of the game means that letting people build their city near yours could mean your game suffers from their pollution, crime, etc. Which makes the idea of sharing seem less pleasant. However, should a neighbour abandon their city, you could eventually take it over.

There’s still no date on when the beta starts, which is a shame, but it’s still scheduled to be released in February next year.

This is pretty funny and sad. I wish games weren’t so wedded to the $50 price point. I would personally much rather pay $100 for a whole game than have all this DLC nonsense. But I know discretionary pricing is a great tool for them.

Well, that sucks. Hopefully we can use a full landscape editor to create regions that aren’t plugged in to the larger Sim world at some point, so at least we can use them offline in our own environments without having to worry about what others are doing.

I can understand not having it in an online setting where you’re given a plot of land and told to do your worst with it, but offline’s a different matter.

My cynical guess is they won’t allow that, instead they will publish DLC that contains new regions, either random or modelled after famous real life locations.
My positive minded guess? The same thing.

It’s pretty much a given with EA they will milk the game for all the DLC they can and allow as little user made content as possible.

If they actually allow you to create your own region, then points to them, would put it on my to buy list even.. maybe…

2. Check the knowing face the dev makes at about 54m15s after confirming that solo play will still include “all the great social features, leaderboards, bullshit dumb stuff like that” (I might be paraphrasing slightly)

I don’t understand why people say things like this. Are you seriously suggesting that your decision to purchase something hinges *entirely* on these single low-gameplay-impact features? I mean, it’s never “If this game turn out to be completely broken in X way, it’s a no-sale”. Instead it’s “If [something absurdly trivial] is included in the game, it’s a no-sale”

Boggles my mind.

It’s like if someone went to buy a car, but then decided not to because they learned there’s an option to get it in green and they hate green. You don’t NEED to purchase the green car, but the mere fact that it CAN be purchased as a green car ruins everything somehow

No terraforming?! What? That’s not how civilization works! We’ve been carving the land to our needs for thousands of years!

Edit: It seems like placing roads will do some terraforming for you. That’s a start, but I need to be able to level swaths of land for my own nefarious purposes. Building a city is NOT A “PUZZLE,” it is bending the land to the human will.

In other news, 2x2km?? Check the city size at 0:53:00. Even if that’s a small city, that’s not even big enough for a village! We need at least two orders of magnitude larger plots. They seem to have a very serious problem with scale in this game. See 0:59:00 where he talks about having bus stations instead of subways (what?!). He says they researched the range people are willing to walk to bus stops (400m) then shows that displayed on the road as he places them and it’s no more than 50m. That can’t be right.

I seriously get more and more angry the more they reveal about this game. Color me severely concerned about the future of Sim City.

Exactly! Each garage has a bus? Oh boy, you can have 24 buses in your entire city! That’s smaller than the fleet of buses that serve my surrounded-by-prairie barely-even-a-city of 50,000 people. I think scale, or lack thereof is this game’s biggest weakness. The always-on DRM doesn’t sweeten the deal.

I agree, 2x2km is too small. 20×20 is an acceptable size for a real city building game. Monstrous metropoli still won’t fit, but it’s good enough for most cities.
I guess we want a game of Supreme Commander scale, not a Starcraft-sized one.

My inner cynic says that making the city sizes larger would require a larger investment from EA in its back-end world-hosting server platform; and that the beancounters, not the developers, are the source of this 2×2 restriction.

I live in a city, of not quite 300,000. the built up area is about… 20km by 25km, not including the bits that’s wrapped around a large lake in the southern part. I would not consider this to be a large city. with the 2kmx2km limit… i could maybe fit the CBD and old town in, or perhaps my favorite suburb and it’s little shopping street (can’t call it a high street because some idiot in the 1800’s thought a creeks flood zone was a good spot for retail)

the scale they are giving us is not served by multiple power stations, it’s a single substation on the large state grid. it would have a small water reservoir, but not it’s own sewerage, a town of that size would have septic tanks unless it was very close to a real city. A town of that size would have a population of around 10,000 would it not? i could see it getting up to 15,000 if everyone jammed into apartments and didn’t have gardens… so I would not call this SIMCITY but more of a SIMVille (wait ville would annoy zynga)… SIMtown (wait we did a kiddie’s game called that)… SIMburb (that sounds stupid who would buy it) SIM… bugger it. just call it a city and they’ll never notice anyways, they’ll be to happy it’s not a SIMS expansion.

He’s a Community Manager at Simtropolis, and the clipboard presumably has community questions. Doesn’t make it any less awkward, though. The horrendous sound mixing quality really doesn’t help either. I could barely hear Kip Katserelis talk at all with full volume and noise-cancelling headphones.

But he explained that THAT kind of terraforming definitely is in the game. It’s the godlike shaping of land prior to the city stage that’s been cut. I’m not *super* happy about losing that, but at the same time, folding those actions into the management part of the game will certainly help the game balance. So it’s a bit of a trade off.

Came here to cry about the missing subways, glad to see I’ve been beaten to the punch. No power lines–ok. That was kind of tedious anyway. But no subways? A densely packed metropolis with no subways is just going to be so wrong.

Oh wait, I’m sure it’ll be in DLC that we’ll have the privilege of paying more for.

I have no problem with this small town focused sim-city game, as long as they are consistent with it. I don’t want 300 buildings and a population of 50,000 though as a town that big has thousands of structures!

The Sim City franchise has always been the wrong scale to represent a large metro area anyway. In Sim City 4 the largest maps could barely represent my city council district in Saint Paul Minnnesota. St. Paul barely would fit in an entire region, much less the whole metro area, which is maybe 75km on a side at least.

Same here. Was super-psyched when it was announced, but the more I see where they’re going with it the less I want it. Who gives a hoot about the social features?! Subways, dammit!

I’m usually amused at the “Grumble, grumble… no sale, I’ll just play the old game” type comments, but this time I find myself in agreement with them. The best thing the new SC offers is more specific buildings like casinos, but balanced against everything they’ve removed from the previous games–light vs. heavy zones, subways, map editor, etc.–it just doesn’t match up.

I don’t understand all of the backtracking. The city size in SimCity is the size of a medium city in SC4 (Which I felt was pretty small). There’s no terraforming. The water utilities have been casualized. Oh, sorry, “simplified”. They got rid of subways. What else are they removing? The grid? Clean industry? Llamas?

We want a mix between SimCity 3000 and SimCity 4 that can run properly on modern machines. Maybe bigger and with complexities that differ depending on the difficulty level. That’s what we’ve been clamoring for since 2004.

There are a few things in this new SimCity that are pretty cool, but they would be amazing if they built on the foundation of SC3K or SC4 and added those features. As it stands, it’s SimCity Societies+. It’s telling that I was somehow relieved that they hadn’t removed zoning from the game. “Oh good,” I thought, “This isn’t just dynamic SCURK”.

It bothers me that everything in this video smacks of the smaller scale. They only dedicated 29 minutes of this hour and 17 minute keynote to SimCity. Clearly, Maxis is not really designating much effort in to the game. Those two guys on the couch – is that the entire development team minus the art division? SimCity used to be the biggest game on the planet, now it’s not even worth half of a keynote.

Exactly. Sim City was always more like “Sim Small Town”, and this version looks like Sim Hamlet. I actually don’t mind having a SIm Hamlet, but I also hope they make a Sim Metro someday. Preferably after someone destroys EA.

You just blew my mind. I think you’re right! It seems so obvious now, but that’s it: This SimCity is the result of trying to combine two demographics that only have a small amount of crossover. Forcing the crossover on the rest of the demographic is just plain cruel.

Yeah this really seems like a SimCity for the Farmville/Sims players. The video makes it feel less like a simulation of city management and more like a toybox. Maybe they were just highlighting the fluffy parts for the Sims people who were the target audience of this livestream, but I’m not very hopeful.

Why would you want to unleash a disaster on a city when you have no way of reverting back to the non destroyed version?

Or is it random just to really annoy you after you spend ages making the city, again with no way to save and go back?

[EDIT] Is there a way to play it wihtout other players influcing your city, i don’t awnt to make a city that works well, then have polution cause someone is just using dirty industries next to me, then stops playing.

Considering that question was most likely asked… multiple times knowing simtropolis I believe they just avoided answering it.
They know what the answer is and looking at EA it’s history with this we all know what the answer is most likely, and why they’d rather not tell it to prospective buyers that are still delusional and filled with hope.

heh, that would be fun. I have no idea how you would do it, perhaps have layers? and each layer is worth 5 stories? and have large blocks. you start at the bottom and as you zone up they build up and as a block gets past level 5-10 the lower levels of it and the surrounding blocks loose desirability and value, forcing you to build up to the sun. rezoning the areas as technology changes the employment demographics, with suspended bridges between blocks…

They never did answer the question about the game being easier. Yeah, a billion graphs are great and add complexity, but it doesn’t make the game more difficult. From all the gameplay previews, it seemed pretty cookie cutter of “add this” and “add that” and your citizens are happy. The old SimCity’s always had a challenge.

I think they just mixed up or demand for complexity, we don’t care as much about detailed information, the complexity we want is in how we interact with it.
Right now the complexity of the gameplay seems to be on the level of Sim City Societies.

I don’t mind an easy to pick up game, but it currently just seems to lack the complexity I want in Sim City, besides the entire information spreadsheets thing.

Edit: Just want to say whenever I say We and Us I actually mean I obviously.

We get it everybody, we fucking get it. This is not the game you are looking for. EA has completely messed with your nostalgia and it’s never going back. Sucks for you, maybe I’ll see you in SimCity: The Expansion Pack: Everything you always wanted including Minecraft, why not.

With that said, yes there are annoying aspects of this game but did you see those infographics? All of those stats??? OH god yes please. There seems to be such attention to minutiae that I can’t help but get excited. Who knows if I’ll even be into it, but creating and being a part of a global economy is what caused me to hit the preorder button. I’ll gamble with my $60. Everybody else, have fun playing some other city simulator. I suggest playing Sim City 4 because it sounds like that’s what everybody wants to play.

1) Always online DRM.
2) Savegames in the “cloud”, can’t reload old savegames or choose when to save.
3) One-size-only plots, allow for small towns, but not grand cities like in SC4.
4) No contiguous city plots like in SC4, so impossible to have your own region.
5) No terraforming
6) No zone densities.
7) A plethora of other reasons.

This isn’t Simcity 5, it’s Sims Societies: Town Edition. It’s a dumbed-down game for people familiar with farmville, with the “Simcity” name slapped on to make som extra sales.

What I find disappointing is the lack of ‘good’ city building / city simulation games these days. There used to be a vast market dedicated to simulations and now it’s almost invisible. I’ve been a big fan of the Simcity series for awhile now and it’s frustrating that after waiting so long for a sequel (glorified Simcity 5000 or something), we are getting a piece of software riddled with EAxis DRM, a butt load of content expansions and all the nonsense EAxis nowadays does to the Sims.

As a fan, it’s just disheartening to witness this. Will Wright’s work is getting spat on.

Honestly this game looks like a lot of fun. The problem is that it isn’t really faithful to the legacy of SimCity. I’d say it has a similar problem to Dragon Age 2, in which if it had simply been called something else, it would have avoided a lot of outrage. If they had called this ‘SimTown 2’ or something along those lines, I don’t think there would have been the same strict expectations about what it ought to be.

Of course, that’s not to say that many of the complaints are legitimate regardless of what it is called. I was hopeful that EA wouldn’t shit all over this one with DRM, DLC and ‘social gaming’ but it seems they couldn’t help themselves.

38.30 or so… where he is picking a site, there are place labelled with “town name” which implies little towns to me, but ALSO site labelled, ” Great Works Site “, which are the shared between towns stuff… like airports and BIG power… so we can’t even choose where those things go. it’s irritating.

I think I wouldn’t be so stonefaced at this game if the max city size wasn’t so small. Putting aside the probable monetary reasons why they made the game this way, I do like the idea of having a global network of cities. But not at the expense of feeling like we no longer own our city experiments. If they want to limit the city size for multiplayer, fine, but make the single-player mode “classic” — give us large cities, mod tools, local saves, etc.

I feel kind of afraid to declare how absolutely excited I am for this game, because everyone’s totally ragging on it and I get the feeling that I’ll be piled on for being an EA fanboy or something. But honest to god, I am REALLY excited about this game. Sorry, but I am, and that’s all there is to it. I can hate EA and think this game is awesome and want to buy it. That’s a thing that I’m allowed to do. Okay? Okay.